Dianne Bradley & Eva Fernández

Graduate Center & Queens CollegeCUNY

Eliciting and Documenting Default Prosody

ABRALIN

23-FEB-05

Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH)

“In silent reading, a default prosodic contour is projected onto the stimulus, and it may influence syntactic ambiguity resolution”

[Fodor 1998, 2002]

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

Just what constitutes a “default prosodic contour”?

How is that prosody to be documented?

What kind of protocol elicits default prosody — in a way allowing reliable documentation?

Aside: What phrasings are in play?

For the RC-attachment ambiguity, assume for themoment that it is phrasing breaks that fix themodifier’s preferred attachment:

Neutral phrasingN1 N2 RC

Phrasing encouraging high attachmentN1 N2][RC

Phrasing encouraging (forcing?) low attachmentN1][N2 RC

Working Assumptions

Default prosody is discourse-neutral

Without sentence-internal focus elements, sentences encountered “out-of-the-blue” have broad focus.

Default prosody takes grammatical defaults

Prosodic principles refer variously to syntax-prosody alignment, prosodic weight, eurhythmia and so on. Each of these has language-specific settings.

Prosody is prosody

The same grammatical principles apply in projected (implicit) prosody and in realized (overt) prosody.

Documenting Prosody

ToBI transcription [Tones & Break Indices]

Trained ears assess the type and placement of accents and phrase boundaries.

Data are subjective — but can be validated by agreement among independent judges.

Instrumental evaluation

The physical correlates of perceptual categories (accent and phrase boundary types) are measured with speech analysis software.

Data are objective — but subject to technical problems. Note that machines, unlike human ears, cannot abstract away from source variation.

Instrumental Evaluation: Problems Intrinsic F0, Intrinsic Duration

F0 varies substantially with, e.g., vowel quality. Example: [i] vs. low [a], ~20 Hz

Duration varies with segmental content.

Variation within and between speakersF0 and speech rate are speaker-specific. (And even within speaker, these can have utterance-specific settings.)

F0 Declination

F0 (usually?) declines systematically within an utterance, as does F0’s dynamic range.

Solving Instrumental Problems?Materials designComparing sentences with themselves gets around intrinsic F0/duration effects, at critical regions.

e.g., RC LENGTH CONTRASTThe plot concerns the guardian of the prince who was exiled. The plot concerns the guardian of the prince who was exiled from the country …

Other considerationsComparing speakers with themselves gets around between-speaker variation. Appropriate instruction is required to minimize within-speaker variation.Appropriate protocols must take into account the “discourse context” created by materials repetition.

Default Prosody in Overt Elicitations

Utterances are unambiguous, for speakersFree variation in ambiguity resolution is disastrous. (Consider direction-of-causality arguments). So an elicitation protocol must resolve syntactic ambiguity.

What direction of resolution will elicit default prosody?

Answer? Low attachment (in N1-of-N2-RC)Low attachment offers no specific trigger — unlike high attachment, with its change in branching direction — to force a phrase break at any particular location within the critical region.

An Alternative Answer?No one direction of attachment will elicit default prosody, strictlyEach of low and high attachment biases prosodic phrasing in its own way.

Default prosody is therefore to be estimated in the average of — or perhaps consistencies between? — the patterns of phrasing that are typical of each available resolution of the ambiguity.

Potential Worry: Does presenting the same materials with variable attachment site (high, low) invite contrastive focus?

Achieving Disambiguation

Syntactic devices

… the guardians of the prince who was exiled …… the guardians of the prince who were exiled …

Syntactic/semantic devices

… the mother of the prince who was exiled with his …… the mother of the prince who was exiled with her…

“Disembedding” device

The simplex sentence pair disambiguates

Speakers are instructed to utter each simplex sentence (New York Post), and to move on smoothly to combine these in a third complex sentence (New York Times)

Complex sentence contains N1-of-N2-RC:

The plot concerns the guardian of the prince.The prince was exiled.

“The plot concerns the guardian of the prince who was exiled.”

Restrictive RC

The plot concerns the guardian of the prince.The guardian was exiled.

High Attachment

The plot concerns the guardian of the prince.Which prince? The prince who was exiled.

Non-Restrictive RC

The plot concerns the guardian of the prince.By the way, that particular prince was exiled.

Subject Position

Robert yelled at the companion of the tramp.Which tramp? The tramp who juggles.

Object Position

The companion of the tramp yelled at Robert.Which tramp? The tramp who juggles.

Other constructions? Other manipulations?